Where to begin. In the past month we have been dealing with daily drops of our digital telephone and internet service, varying from once to multiple times a day, ranging from a few seconds to a few hours. My wife works as a customer service rep from a home office and every time the internet drops she loses connection to anyone she was talking to on the phone (VOIP via VPN, not the RCN digital phone service.) This causes her employer to have her stay offline for a time to verify the connection is stable again. After 9 (or 10?) visits from RCN, with multiple changes of cable heads, cable modems, and splitters, both inside and outside the home, they finally determined the cause to be a corroded connection on a pole over a mile from our house. Since that fix we had no drops (that we've noticed anyway) for over a week.
Yesterday we had another outage of 4 hours right in the middle of the work day (noon to about 4pm). Another day of lost time for my wife. Called RCN and they schedule us for 8am to 10am. I call back at 10:45am this morning as no tech has shown up. Turns out they changed it to 8am to 9PM with no requirement to be home. Only problem is they never called us to tell us that. We are still waiting to find out what this visit will find.
We've spent a lot of time on the phone with RCN and I have to say I'm not terribly impressed with the service. It seems like the first level support doesn't know what they're talking about half the time as we were constantly getting conflicting stories about what was going on compared to what the technicians at the house were telling us. The technicians at the house varied greatly as well. We had cable heads replaced incorrectly on the first visit that made the problems worse that had to be corrected on later visits. We were told it was bad cable from house to common box, then taps between common boxes, then some external noise outside our development (which appears to be the actual cause).
On top of all that we were given about a $50 credit for lost service. This pales in comparison to the accumulation of hours of time lost for my wife's job, which is not paid time off.
We've been with RCN for 15 years at this address, and another 5 years at a previous address. This is by far the worst experience we've had and if I had an option to switch to another company I would. Unfortunately when our development was built, the builder made a deal with RCN for exclusive cable access, blocking out competitors.
Just needed to vent.
↧